The Writer's Almanac® with Garrison Keillor

About the Program

Garrison Keillor recounts the historical highlights of each day and reads a short poem or two.

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Today's Show

Saturday's Poem: "For a Dying Tomcat Who's Relinquished His Former Hissing and Predatory Nature" by Mary Karr, from Sinner's Welcome. Saturday's Literary Notes: It's the birthday of poet Theodore Roethke, born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1908. He grew up working with his father and uncle in his family's greenhouses, and later said, "They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something beautiful." His uncle committed suicide in 1923, and his father died of cancer that same year. Roethke kept notebooks, lots of notebooks, more than 200 of them over the course of his life, jotting down random thoughts, scraps of phrases, conversations, and criticisms (of himself as well as others). Some of these notes eventually found their way into his poetry, but not many of them did; his biographer Allen Seagar estimated that only 3 percent of the lines he jotted down were ever published. Read more...

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